


There's Nothing, Nothing You Can Teach Me

by morganya



Category: Bandom
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-06-03
Updated: 2008-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-20 07:00:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/210020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Pete and Travis, lost in space.</p>
            </blockquote>





	There's Nothing, Nothing You Can Teach Me

**Author's Note:**

> Set in the period in March '08, when Pete and Travis decided that they wanted to hole up in Pete's house painting pictures. Title shamelessly stolen from Amy Winehouse.

Pete picks him up at the hotel. Travis meets him at the reception desk, waving his arms like he thinks Travis is going to overlook him. When Travis walks over, Pete waits for him to make the first move, and Travis hopes he doesn't wait too long before bending down and hugging him. Pete's eyes are puffy and dark, and he smells like coffee and hazelnut syrup.

"Ready to get out of here?" Pete says.

"Already gone," Travis says.

The sun feels strange on his skin when they walk outside, and everything seems too bright and hot, even at whatever ridiculous hour of the morning it is. He almost stumbles walking out the door, and when Pete turns his head he has to play it off like he was looking at a bird or a cloud or something that Pete can't see. The world's been looking sharper for a while, as though everything's shot through a high-focus lens. Travis can remember lying in the hotel room and thinking that he could see every pockmark in the wall, every crack in the ceiling.

But then he knew that freaky shit happened during withdrawal.

"Yo, feel like going to Disneyland?" Pete says, just before he unlocks the car. "It's like nine in the morning, we can beat the crowds."

Travis looks at him. "I got that shit out of my system when I was five. You got to catch up to me, man."

" _Finding Nemo_ ride," Pete says. "Best time of your life." He beams.

"What kind of sad-ass life do you lead when _Finding Nemo_ 's the fucking highlight?" Travis says, but smiles back.

"Hey, I take what I can get," Pete says. "Quit stalling, there are rides I could be on right now."

Pete really doesn't want to go to Disneyland. Travis lights a cigarette; he's tired, bone-tired and already sleepwalking, and his shirt fits awkwardly across his shoulders. He has a feeling that Pete doesn't know what to say and so he's being a dick to compensate. "Knock it off," he says, and it comes out flat.

"Fine, okay, crush my dreams," Pete says. He opens the door.

It takes an hour to get from the hotel to Pete's house. Travis runs out of conversation fifteen minutes into the drive - it's a new feeling, where he doesn't have much to say. He used to be able to talk shit about just about anything. He sort of hopes it passes soon. Pete keeps up a monologue which he tries to go along with, but then it starts to be too much effort. Pete picks up on it and the rest of the ride is filled with Travis trying to think of something to say and Pete trying to keep his mouth shut.

It was Pete's idea that he come over for a while after the treatment was done. "Warhol and Basquiat," he said on the phone. "Come on, let's act bohemian. I gotta _wreck_ something, dude."

Travis said, "Yeah, I know, you just want to hang out with me. Grace you with my presence." What he was thinking was that Pete was trying to keep him from going back home for a while, going back to old haunts and bad habits, to doctors who didn't ask questions and friends willing to believe him when he lied again, but he just said to Pete, "I like Tropicana."

"It's already there," Pete said, and then they hung up.

Hopefully Pete's not already regretting asking his ass to come hide out.

When they get to the house, Pete whistles for Hemmy, who doesn't come. Pete sighs and says, "The fuckin' dog ignores everything I do. Total lack of authority. Hey, come see all the shit we got."

Pete's house is scarily huge. He's hung out here a couple of times, and it never stops being slightly disconcerting, like he'd accidentally open a door and fall into some other dimension. Pete walks through the halls like he doesn't even believe he lives here, always looking at the walls and windows, trying to ground himself.

The half-assed makeshift studio that they're going to use is at the back of the house, overlooking the backyard. Pete swings the door open and gestures. "Ash and I raided every art supply place we could find. I don't even know what half this shit is."

He's not sure if Pete's waiting for him to approve. The room is filled with canvases and puffy paint ( _Puffy paint_? What the hell, he'll work with it), silkscreens and brushes, spray cans, tiny tubes of oil paint. The table's covered with what looks like a cut-up bed sheet. He lifts up a corner; it is a fucking bed sheet. He looks at Pete. "You're not planning on sleeping under this when I'm out of here, right? Or making me use it? I got expensive tastes and having clean sheets is one of them."

"Give me a break. We couldn't find any drop cloths. The whole of L.A., and no drop cloths." Hemmy finally decides to make his presence known, swaggering up to the door and sniffing at Pete's shoe. Pete swings him up in his arms and waves his paw at Travis. Hemmy looks tolerant but already over it. Pete says, "I could have made my mom send over some of my old stuff. You could be creating art on Big Bird's face right now."

"My talent's bigger than _Sesame Street_ , dude," Travis says. "You ready to have me show you how it's done?"

"Are you ready?" Pete says, but it's an actual question as opposed to just fucking around, and Travis doesn't know how to answer. He hasn't actually sat down and gotten to draw in a while. He doesn't know what shit's itching to come out of his head, or if he's even got anything wanting to come out right now, or what the fuck his process is.

It used to be really fucking easy to make decisions. He kind of wants that back.

"I got shit to do today anyway," Pete says, saving his ass. "Looking at samples. And I gotta see this doctor at two. The sleep thing."

Travis looks at him.

Pete puts the dog down. "Real deal, bro. Being a grownup. Your room's down the hall."

By the time Travis gets his stuff stored in the guest room, he's too tired to sleep, so he just walks back out again and goes through the house opening and closing doors. He's going to know this house better than Pete does, just as a point of pride.

In one of the bathrooms, there's a shirt and a pair of shoes thrown into the tub, and the wastebasket is overflowing (Pete's been bitching about his maid slacking off, an actual fucking _maid_ , he'd fucking go down on someone for his problems). Travis goes to wash his hands and looks down just a little, not enough to be snooping, but just enough to be observant; in the wastebasket, almost obscured by a blood-flecked paper, there's a ton of pill bottles.

For just a second, he gets the old familiar greediness, but he manages to push it back. It's a little victory, but the tension at the back of his head lets up a little. He nudges the basket with his foot and hears the plastic rattle.

Either Pete's trying to minimize the chance of him going back to where he was, or he's trying to do the same thing Travis is.

*****

One of the first things he and Pete bonded over was pharmaceuticals. He thought he was doing okay by just sticking to the regular shit – hydrocodone, oxycodone, benzodiazepine, his reliable old friends – but Pete scoffed and said, "Dude, where's the adventure in that?"

Pete was way more into the drugstore cowboy idea than he was. He had shit stashed around his house that Travis had never heard of (not that he'd admit it), in places he'd always forget about. He was generous about his pills – if Travis ever ran short on Xanax, Pete was always good to snag a few off of.

He'd never really seen Pete high. He'd probably shown up at the Fall Out Boy bus weaving and slurring more than once, but Pete was too much of a fucking control freak to ever really let go and get fucked up. The most he could say was that Pete was careless about his mixing and matching. They'd spent a lot of nights together with Pete sweaty and shaky, nauseated, rubbing his arms and legs to try to get the muscles to stop spasming. Travis always said, "Dude, you take _three_ and let them do their thing, what's this shit," and Pete always said, "Fuck you, I would have been fine if I'd eaten breakfast."

He always sort of felt smug then, because he'd thought he'd passed the take-anything-anyone-hands-you phase, thought he'd found the right balance with the drinking and the weed and the pills, because he wasn't sick and puking and he could play shows and write songs. He'd hoped that Pete could grow out of whatever the fuck he was doing, and learn from his example.

*****

After the initial flare of anxiety, he decides that he likes the studio. He and Pete stay up late, wearing their pajamas and switching their canvases every so often. Pete makes pictures that look like folk art, people with big stretched mouths and weird skinny arms, and claims it's deliberate, but Travis thinks that Pete just doesn't know shit about perspective. His paintings still look like graffiti, big and bright and thick-lined, and it's weird how he can feel like he's fifteen again once he gets a spray can in his hand. He doesn't feel exactly like himself, but he still feels sort of familiar.

Pete keeps offering to take him out, go to the movies or go DJ at some club ("No, Trav, I know a guy, it's cool"), which he thinks is just Pete feeling guilty about being antisocial, but he's got no damn guilt about saying no. He really doesn't want to be out in public right now.

Patrick calls sometimes, telling him about the album and how it's going (without him). The conversations only take one detour into how-are-you-doing land, but he tells Patrick to keep to topics of general interest and Patrick gets the message pretty quick. Disashi sends him samples of music and tells him about how Eric and he are trying to get some crazy Sam Cooke meets George Clinton thing together, so he knows they're still tight, not falling apart without him there. Matt sends him texts saying _not the same w/o u_ , but Matty's reassuring that way.

Ashlee comes over a lot, all shining eyes and big smiles – he doesn't know if Pete's told her the whole story of why he's hanging out at the house; it's more than entirely likely. He sort of wants to take her aside and let her know that he's totally not trying to be the third wheel, except that would probably be weird. But she doesn't mention that it's out of the ordinary to have him galumphing around her boyfriend's place, just brings over caramel popcorn and the cheap fruit punch that Pete insists on drinking and kung-fu DVDs, and complains about how bad she is at being domestic. She sits in Pete's lap while they watch movies in the home theater, her foot, in crazy-colored socks, brushing against Travis' leg. Sometimes she tells him how awesome it would be if they did a song together, like the ones he did with Gabe (he asks her, "Are you seriously trying to act like _Gabe_?" and she giggles and says, "I don't think I'm tall enough"). Sometimes she and Pete disappear together when it starts getting late, and then in the morning Travis runs into her in the kitchen, and she burns eggs while he talks to her about whatever he's not avoiding thinking about.

*****

Pete's phone rings when they're in the studio at three in the morning. Travis is trying to get a weather-beaten effect on his canvas, brushing washes of blue over the streaks and then scraping at it with the other side of his brush, and the ringing makes him jump and swipe paint over his palm. Pete curses and drops his brush, fumbling for the phone.

"Hey, babe…No, I'm just here with Trav. What? Hold on." Pete drops the brush and starts for the door out into the hall. "No, babe, it's fine, what are you talking about? I told you not to Google. That shit's ridiculous. It _is_." He shuts the door and Travis looks intently at his painting and tries not to listen, but Pete's voice carries.

"Because I know what I'm doing, that's why. Ashlee, Jesus Christ – what the fuck were you looking at anyway? Babe, that's like looking up gangrene symptoms when you stub your toe. It is." Pete's voice drops; all that Travis can make out is a reassuring murmur. After a minute, it stops and Pete comes back in. He shrugs. "Sorry. My girlfriend's freaking out."

"What'd you do now?"

" _I_ didn't do anything. She saw something on the internet that freaked her out."

"I thought she'd already seen you naked."

"Fuck you," Pete says, bright red, and picks up his brush. "Let me see that shit you were doing earlier."

*****

The thing that he's really tried not to think about is how much easier it was to write when you were fucked up. It was way, way easier – take a pill, take a drink, smoke a bowl, and the voice inside his head saying _not good enough_ and _who the fuck you think you fooling_ shut up for a while, and then, fuck, there were words on paper and he could show them off, spit lyrics into the microphone and go another day saying he was the biggest brightest shiniest motherfucker alive.

More than ten years on a crutch. More than ten years and he couldn't even count how many things he'd lost, some temporarily and some gone forever – friends, girlfriends, boyfriends, family – and he'd gotten through it by thinking that the music would still be there for him, that the words would keep coming no matter what tactics he used to drag the little fuckers out, that he was still Travis no matter how much he tried to fuck himself up.

He's still here. He's not sure if the words still are.

*****

It hasn't been a good day for either of them. Travis woke up aching and itchy, too itchy to focus on anything than sitting by Pete's living room window chain-smoking and biting his nails, and Pete hasn't even _moved_ in two hours, hunched up on the sofa like a gargoyle in a hoodie, listlessly watching Hemmy try to eat the couch. The shadows around his eyes are so dark that they look like smudged makeup.

"I don't think I'm up for art," Travis says, but Pete doesn't answer, so he just leaves him be.

"My fuckin' doctor is full of shit," Pete says abruptly.

"What?"

Pete doesn't answer. "Goddamnit, cut that out," he says to the dog, but Hemmy ignores him.

*****

He has rough days, but he generally felt a whole lot better than when he was actually in the program, where he spent forever lying on the bed in the hotel with the air conditioning blasting, wearing nothing but his boxers because his fucking skin hurt too much to put on a shirt, sweating and shaking and trying not to think he was losing his damn mind.

In more lucid moments, he could text people, harass Patrick about production and set up schedules with Pete, but he tried to stay away from the phone so he wouldn't freak out when someone was talking to him.

Near the end of it, when he was actually able to be in the hotel room and not spend the time in between therapy appointments puking or hallucinating, Disashi sent him an MP3 over the computer, music full of bounce and summertime, and then he figured he had to get his shit together and get on the phone.

"Work on the lyrics when you get out," Disashi said.

"It sounds fuckin' awesome."

"I'm just trying to live up to you."

"Yeah, that's a fucking great aspiration," and man, he could have kicked himself, because he'd wanted really badly to be grateful and positive and shit, but what with everything going on it was hard to control his tongue.

"I'm pretty sure it is," Disashi said. "Come back soon. Come back _well_."

"I'm trying. We'll see."

"Come on," Disashi said. "You tryin' to tell me that _Travis fuckin' McCoy_ hasn't got it in him?"

"Sashi, I don't know –"

"We miss you," he said. "Like fuckin' crazy. But you just keep doing what you're doing, and we'll be there."

Of all the things Disashi could have said or brought up – the fucked up shows, the missed appointments, the lying and the disappearing and whatever else he'd done that he didn't remember – he didn't know why Disashi would go with that. Travis said, "Yeah."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, okay. Look, I gotta go. Therapy shit."

"See you soon," Disashi said, and then Travis hung up because he really didn't want Disashi to hear him cry over the phone.

It was a little easier and a little harder after that.

*****

Travis wakes up choking, with Hemmy barking like crazy outside his door. The room smells like smoke and burning oil and for a moment he thinks he forgot to put his cigarette out before he fell asleep, except his cigarettes are all the way downstairs. He thinks, _Holy shit, the house_ , and pole-vaults out of bed and yanks his sneakers on before shoving his way out the door, yelling, "Pete?"

The smoke alarm starts going off as he gets the door open, right in his ear. The lights in the hall are on, which hopefully means it's not an electrical fire, hopefully fucking Pete just forgot to turn the stove off and there's a burnt grilled cheese smoldering harmlessly somewhere downstairs, but the dog's still barking, wildly scratching at the closed door to the studio, and there's smoke pouring out from under the door and fuck, fuck, _fuck_.

He tries to remember what he'd learned from watching _Backdraft_ , but his eyes are already tearing up and his chest is tightening up and he's got to get the door open and take care of things before he goes into a full-scale asthma attack. He kicks the door open and gets hit with a wave of heat and smoke, practically singeing an eyebrow right off. He can see _something_ moving in the smoke, batting at some dancing orange flames where the painting Pete was working on used to be, and Travis shouts, "Pete!" before careening in, shoving the little shadowy person out of the way and yanking the burning canvas off the table and stomping on the flame. His chest is almost totally closed off from the smoke and he can hear himself wheezing and gasping. There are little flying bits of ash going past his face.

He gets the fire out. He doesn't really know how, but it's out. He staggers over to the window and throws it open, trying to get fresh air, but it's fucking California, smog is everywhere, and he's going to have to go back to his room and grab his inhaler before he passes out.

The little person is Pete – well, he already kind of knew that – huddled shaking and wide-eyed in the corner where Travis shoved him, and Travis grabs him roughly by the arm and hauls him out of there.

"What the _fuck_?" Travis wheezes once they make it out to the hall, the smoke alarm still going off and Hemmy jumping up, whining and trying to lick Pete's face.

”I was trying to do something, some effect," Pete says, pressed against the wall. He's fucking _on_ something, Travis can tell – his pupils are huge and glassy, and he's moving too slow. "Dropped the thing –"

"You fucking asshole," Travis says. "You dumb motherfucker. What the fuck did you take?"

"I didn't –"

" _What?_ "

"It was just a Dormalin. Just one, I –" The smoke's clearing out fast but the smoke alarm's still going off. Pete cuts himself off.

"Fuck you," Travis says. "Fuck you. Fuck you, I didn't get my ass all the way through rehab so I could fucking burn to death in fucking California, you asshole."

They stare at each other. Well, Travis stares at Pete, because Pete can't even look him in the eye. Hemmy whimpers.

"Goddamnit, Pete," Travis says, and staggers back to his room to try and find his inhaler.

When his lungs open back up, sweet, sweet oxygen, he's still too freaked out to go back to sleep, so he just stomps downstairs and sits in the home theater, staring at the television screen without turning it on. He lights a cigarette, because what the fuck, it's not like more smoke could hurt him, and feels his legs start to shake.

Eventually, he hears a knock at the door. Pete says, "Can I come in?"

"Your fucking house," Travis says.

Pete comes into the room, Hemmy tagging after him. He sits down, keeping a seat between him and Travis, and stares at his hands.

"I fucked up," he says.

" _No,_ " Travis says.

Pete doesn't argue.

"What were you thinking, anyway?" Travis says. "Did you think it was, like, _brilliant_ to drug yourself up and then go paint?"

"Dude, I _wasn't_ thinking," Pete says. "Other than being fuckin' sick of not sleeping, anyway. I just thought I had it under control."

"You _don't_ ," Travis says. "I mean, I fuckin' don't either, you know that, I don't. We don't."

"I know," Pete says. "I know, I know. I'm sorry. I'm fuckin' so sorry."

"Goddamnit, Pete," Travis says again, but there's not really much force in it, because it's probably true, that they don't have it under control. Probably he's going to start laughing about it, once he stops being upset, because, damn, how bad does it have to get when Travie the pill-popper tells you to take it easy?

"This is the worst thing," Pete says. "This is, like, Don Simpson meets that doctor guy. But with less dying in the pool."

"Yeah," Travis says. He gently swings a leg out and kicks Pete's knee, not hard enough to hurt. "Asshole. Get over here."

Pete looks guiltily at him but moves over a seat. "Hey, you know, you finally said the R-word."

"Rehab?" Travis says.

"Rehab."

"Yeah," Travis says, "yeah, I guess I did."

*****

Right before Travis heads out, back to the album and whatever normal life's going to be for him now, when they've packed up all the paintings and tried to clean up the studio, sort of, Pete comes into his room at four in the morning and crawls into bed with him, silently, tentatively.

"Yeah?" Travis says.

"Nothing, dude," Pete says, and buries his face in Travis' shoulder. "Hey, how about you move in with me and never leave? The place is big enough."

"Like I'm one of your Lost Boys?"

"Exactly."

"Gotta grow up sometime," Travis says.

Maybe they kiss. They probably definitely kiss, except Travis knows it's not going to be a lasting thing, because Pete's got a girl and Travis likes her and he likes her and Pete together. He maybe hopes Pete knows that too.

"What do you think?" he asks, forehead pressed to Pete's messy hair. "You like this new Travie? He's a dude you still want to hang out with?"

"Don't be a dumbass," Pete says, and yawns. "You're always going to be Travie, and I'm always going to want you around."


End file.
